Sunday, May 22, 2011

On June 6-9, when the doors to Cloud Expo New York open at the Jacob Javits Center, IT infrastructure and operations professionals from around the world will be able to see with their own eyes that the "Summer of Cloud Computing" has well and truly begun.

Thursday, May 5, 2011

One can add the word "social" to any other word in the English language right now, and somewhere, sometime, a group of software developers will turn the colloquy into some kind of a website or application.

Take "social" + "comparison" for example.

In 2006, whileon maternity leave, French-born Vanina Berger (pictured) - a senior software engineer - wanted to compare unusual things such as the best place to give birth. Realizing that it was not so easy to find comparison tables about things that were not products to sell, she began wondering if perhaps what was needed was a comparison engine, a tool that allowed one to collaborate with others to maintain a matrix with a lot of interesting details, advanced criteria such as ratings, etc. In short it would be very nice to have a generic, collaborative and social tool that helps everyone to create easily comparisons...about ANYTHING.

Vanina's partner Alexis Fruhinsholz found the idea interesting and started to work on the project at the end of 2008. The result was SocialCompare.com, a site I'd not heard of until the team behind it reached out to me yesterday to ask if I'd like to use it to conduct a comparative survey of PaaS/Cloud services.

The results are below. Let me know what you think about SocialCompare.com as an application. I am certainly intrigued.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

May 1st seemed the perfect day to just take a few moments to pause and take stock. This is going to be the only year of my life (I hope!!) involving an escape from death, and in those circumstances it is difficult to prevent oneself from wondering how best to use the gift that has been handed to me: nothing less than the remainder of my life.

So let me report on the results...

First, a brief historical preamble. Eighteen years ago - on April 30, 1993 - CERN released the source code of the world's first Web browser and editor into the public domain. It was called WorldWideWeb, all joined together just like that, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee has some screen shots of it at his CERN page.

It would be very difficult to argue anything other than that, in the eighteen subsequent years, the technological trajectory that CERN's browser heralded has resulted in tumultuous changes in business, education, government, entertainment, and society. Did it cause them? Maybe not. Did it accelerate them? Hell, yes!!

"CERN's intention in this is to further compatibility, common practices and standards in networking and computer supported collaboration," wrote CERN in its accompanying note to the release of the code (pictured above). It was a phrase that resonated with me then, and it is one that resonates with me still today. "Computer supported collaboration" - on which I published a pioneering book in 1994 edited by the late Peter Lloyd - is, in my view, the philosopher's stone of the World Wide Web. Like that imaginary substance that people in the past believed could change any other metal into gold, "eCollaboration" has been touted throughout every one of those eighteen years as the real payoff from the Web....if only companies, organizations, governments and indeed society at large could figure out how to harness it.

Email is the world's most widespread form of computer supported collaboration. Facebook is another, far more recent one - as is YouTube and eBay and Skype and of course Twitter. Yet it is my view, and has been for many years, that none of these technologies or applications or sites unleashes the true potential of co-intelligence - the shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration (and competition) of many individuals.

So how can we get from TBL's browser to a truly co-intelligent world?

That, as I reflected on May Day in my book-lined, technology-rich work studio, is the crucial and most significant question of our time. It is also a question to the exploration and answering of which I am intending to devote a significant proportion of my efforts, moving forward.

"There is a quantitative element to human affairs," as H.G. Wells once famously wrote. "Doing something does not amount to very much if we do not do enough." [my emphasis]